Hello and welcome @ChrisR, my name is Alberto. I am an old-timer here on Edgeryders.
I walked that path myself, back in the 2000s. I was fortunate enough to be put in charge of several first-generation open government projects (blog in English), so I had some opportunities to experiment. I also collected my reflections into a book.
Nowadays I am much less involved in that scene. There is still good work to be done, but I have become pessimistic on the chances of system-level reform from within. I guess I went to deep into complex systems science, with its luggage of emergence and resistance to external pressure. My latest, and probably last, contribution to high-level thinking about government is called The Black Briefing. It proposes that government is just another agent, subject to evolutionary pressure to survive and grow. This pressure systematically steers government in the direction of superimposing standards onto the full complexity of society and the economy. If done with sufficient power, this will result in overwriting society with standards, in a social equivalent of monoculture. Complexity breaks down, and consequences can be dire.
In this perspective, I am quite wary of deploying the metaphor of a commercial service for democracy, like in “user-centric democracy”. It makes complete sense that, say, a restaurant service be user-centric, trying to make it easy for the client to order and consume food. Why, after all, saddle her with the full complexity of procuring the raw materials for her meal, preparing it, keeping the kitchen clean and so on? The information about that is contained in the meal’s price. With democracy, I am not sure the metaphor holds. A voter that thinks she should be spared the intricacies of policy might be an unwary one, believing, for example, that disentangling a national legal and economic system from something as deep and broad as the European Union is a simple matter of cutting a Gordian knot.
How do you see the matter? How does it map onto infrastructure and policy for the Internet?